For Singapore's National Day Parade, VYV and partner Hexogon Solution provided a 360-degree real-time tracked 3D projection mapping for two scenes - a large moving boulder that was to be split into eight pieces, and a floating city made up of 15 collapsible fabric towers totalling 99 objects, which stands 20m tall and 60m in diameter.
Hexogon Solution deployed a total of 40 tracking cameras, 66 projectors each producing 30,000 lumens, 250 VYV Copernic tracking emitters and 12 VYV Photon servers for this task.
Accurate tracking, quick and painless automatic calibration and dynamic edge blending were all essential ingredients to the success of this record-shattering mapping on moving objects.
Adrian Goh, group managing director of Hexogon Solution highlighted, "The challenges faced at this National Day Parade were firstly the constraints of having to map on empty space without actual objects in the initial mapping stage and secondly the short turnaround time allocated for calibrating and alignment on the complex structures after they were erected.
He added that, "the unpredictable on-site wind conditions plays a significant factor, as it will cause the fabric structures to move and deform as we map onto the structures. This issue was greatly resolved through our sophisticated state-of-the-art VYV tracking system as it instantaneously renders and maps onto the uneven moving surfaces."
Martin Granger-Piché, co-founder of VYV and head of strategic development, added, "Largescale events such as these call for processes that remain quick, simple and highly accurate regardless of setup size. Our fully automatic camera and projector calibration took only 55 minutes to calibrate all of the 40 cameras and 66 projectors, which freed up valuable time."
Emric Epstein, co-founder of VYV and head of R&D, enjoyed the opportunity to do motion tracking at such distances. "When cameras are over 100 meters from the tracked surfaces, accuracy is of utmost importance and the calibration process must be independent of scale. It was great to be able to verify that our approach is indeed size-independent and could handle 99 objects, through 250 emitters, simultaneously."
(Jim Evans)
